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Kyle Laws

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Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo. Her collections include This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Lafayette, CO: Liquid Light Press, 2017); So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015); Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014); My Visions Are As Real As Your Movies, Joan of Arc Says to Rudolph Valentino (Dancing Girl Press, 2013); and George Sand’s Haiti (co-winner of Poetry West’s 2012 award). With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.

Poems

Deer Dance Taos Pueblo

A Pueblo woman stretches her hand
from the circle to skins draped
on dancers as they pass by,
her gnarled fingers stroking wet musky
fur of fresh antelope and deer.
Each time she reaches past my shoulder,
I feel my grandmother’s swollen fingers
in my waist-length hair, twisting
it high on my head in summer,
sunburned ends red against
winter black strands, or when
the sun dipped to the bay's horizon,
Ordelia at the dining room window
starching white blouses till cotton
scratched like sand of July beaches.
It's the movement of her hands braided
with the rhythm of this Christmas day,
the dance of old hands as they reach
into dark hair and fresh skin.

“Deer Dance Taos Pueblo” appeared in Caprice, They Recommend This Place, and Wildwood.

I Walk the Abyss

A road of amethyst asters & chamisa.
I walk to the pungent smell of sage.
There is a catch in my ribs
like the catch of a roller coaster
climbing the white painted web.
You can hear screams
as the click of teeth pulls cars
around a banked corner,
into the abyss.

It is easier to be here,
because deep under
in the slough of water,
or high above in the painted web,
I cannot carry the lizard in my hands.
He neither likes underground waterways
or the salt-stained air.
He seeks sides of hills
red with the turning of leaves.
The sea is still warm.
The air has not yet changed it.
There is a disequilibrium,
an unbalance between the two.
I cannot hold the lizard in my hands,
flesh the only color it cannot change to.
I will have to stay
while the lizard finds his way
between my hands and autumn's leaves.

“How Do I Tell You About the September Day” appeared in Times of Sorrow/Times of Grace: Writing by Women of the Great Plains-High Plains and Wildwood.

White Shaggy Cattle

Herded down the road
over the Rio Grande Gorge,
fur thick with winter,
small mangy dog to the side
of a young man with a stick,
a caballero,
tall, lanky, a mustached face,
dark eyes like bullfighters
from posters of Mexico;
only it's too cold for calf-length red pants,
a sequined vest,
but the hat is large,
a wide brim to match the mustache,
all bringing up the rear of this cattle train
moving to the Gorge,
snow dusting the ridge.

As the cut tumbles to the Rio Grande,
and thick coats of white cattle
brush chamisa & sage,
we motor toward warm running springs,
step down slowly,
one foot at a time
into the iron waters,
steam rising up to belly and breasts,
washing over shoulders,
welcome warmth of the room
enclosed beneath petroglyph-carved cliffs,
the writings of code,
recordings of movements of people,
a small stick-man,
a caballero,
arm raised
to the running of antelope & deer.

Light and Shadow

Low winter light flickers through
cottonwoods as I walk a boardwalk
on Ranchitos Road, the Harwood no longer
a library where I can pull down books,
but a gallery like every other in Taos:
small rooms and curved walls.

The flicker of light blinds me
to all but the impression of limbs,
towering and like the clack of a train
on a track, recurrent, having its own
rhythm that only a conductor can interpret,
a music of light, a strobe, a sunlight my
eyes only slightly register as they did
in the arcade in front of the ballroom
where I hand-cranked the nickelodeon
and saw carriages on the boardwalk
in an Easter parade, or maybe it was
the sun over the pram's hood as Kay
strolled in her hat and the judge
called out winners over the public
address system, wind blowing tassels
back and forth in front of my eyes as
I turned my face to a warming sun.

“Light and Shadow” appeared in Abbey, Midnight Train to Dodge, and Wildwood.

I Am Coming Home to Wildwood Villas

My hair was yellow that summer,
yellow to match my waitress uniform.
It was dark and thick above my eyes,
one long eyebrow.
They put a man on the moon
while I waited for a bus
with wooden benches,
lit Salems from a sand-crushed pack,
deep breath of menthol
drifting out the window
as we pulled from the station,
passed fishing boats tied up at docks,pink in morning, sailor's warning,
pink at night, sailor's delight,
reciting what I’d been taught,
a shade paler than red.

In evening people streamed
to the bulkhead to watch sunsets
at the top of New Jersey Avenue,
drink quarter beers at Smitty's Bar,
sand drifting on plank floors
and under the shuffleboard's rings,
voices growing with night,
flounder moving up the bay.

I am coming home.
There is still a long walk up
a street moist with the sun's baking.
Tar stains the bottom of my shoes.
I have tried for days
to remember that sailor's refrain.
It is only as I walk into morning
that I know it is about a warning,
about a storm not yet here.

“I Am Coming Home to Wildwood Villas” appeared in They Recommend This Place, the broadside Kyle’s Clam Chowder, and Wildwood.

Crossing

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are
more to me, and more in my meditations,
than you might suppose.

—Walt Whitman

I took a ferry to Walt Whitman's,
continued on down the Delaware Bay
to a few miles above the Point, then
ran with small steps, arms outstretched into
the sunset, like a sandpiper just before flight.
I heard a foghorn against clouds,
saw the silhouetted shape of a ferry
moving across the bay, and knew I was
to spend the night in the crossing.

And so I boarded, took a seat alone in back,
felt the tremor of engines as we backed
into the canal, backed into a cherry ice sunset.
At first it was the pink of sailor's delight,
but as a slight wind rustled,
as a chill whispered at my ears,
it became the cherry ice served by
a woman under a pastel striped umbrella
at the bottom of Pennsylvania Avenue,
hand reaching into a metal cylinder
with a scoop.

Thirty years ago I was on the inaugural voyage,
crossing the bay that only our kites
when cut from their thread journeyed over.
Now, wrapped in an old man's camel hair coat,
I carry red and gold leaves of oak from the walk
to Walt Whitman's.

There's a ferry to cross over
from Camden to Philadelphia,
a ferry to cross over
from Cape May to Lewes;
there's the parting of water,
the wake.

Debris

Yesterday, I walked
the beach of the Villas
gathering debris.
When I started out
it was only
an unbroken tiny pink pearl shell,
a small quilled seagull feather,
a blue clawed crab's pincher,
and the back of its coral rimmed shell.
But then there was
the grey tipped gull feather,
and a baby horseshoe crab the color
of iced coffee with cream.
Soon my hands were full
and I wanted more:
the numbered dock floats tangled
in marine line,
and a blue and yellow coil of rope.
When I lifted it up
I found it connected to
seaweed and salt grass
by a fishing line.
Only for a moment
did I think of untangling
what I wanted from
what it was attached to.
Then I knew I couldn't.
I could no more untangle
the fishing line
from the coil of colored rope
than I could untangle myself
from a foghorn's wail at sunset,
sandbars stretching out long at low tide,
the weathered wood siding of Smitty's Bar,
or the steps to sand swept away in a storm.

“Debris” appeared in Chiron Review, Unexpected Harvest – A Gathering of Blessings, and Wildwood.

My Room of Aloneness and Quarantine

In a back bedroom off the living room
with green wallpaper,
a whole summer closed up
with blond furniture.
I had whooping cough,
had to be isolated, quarantined.
The only contact I had
was when I coughed so hard
they turned me upside down
over the bed to stop.
At night, it was worse.
Days were spent looking out the window
at the lot children played in next door.

The room I now sleep in
was used as a quarantine in the 30s,
the father coming and going through
the window my headboard butts up against.
One summer, I slept with the window open,
feared someone breaking in, got a cough.
I wanted the window open,
a breeze blowing through
as it hadn’t that summer on the bay.

I dreamed of wandering down to the shore,
riding waves under the moon,
lights from Smitty's Bar
casting stripes on the sand,
Mabel the piano player belting songs,
25 cent beers, shuffleboard, plank floors,
cheese steaks on the back grill
sprinkled generously with black pepper,
tide pounding the bulkhead,
boats pulled from moorings,
slim poles in sand,
pier off the Fishing Club,
or the rail boats were launched from into low tide,
docks in harbors off the canal,
ferry boats following flight of my lost kite,
music and voices drifting into
my room by the sea,
my room of aloneness and quarantine.

Even now I want to rise with voices into night,
glide across cool sand,
break into the bait locker at Abananni's Pier,
cast my line under the stream of moon,
rest on the bottom in tide rippled sand,
wait for a flounder to carry me deeper,
run the wake of the ferry
following my yellow kite,
surface in diesel fumed docks where
I once marked the progress of tides.

I struggle to stay awake.
It has been a long night testing tides.
I fall into sounds like into the yellow
and red marker found many years earlier
in the hull of a wrecked ship in winter,
instructions saying to report its finding
to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
They too were marking tides,
the flow of bodies in depths of the sea.

They put out a beacon.
I am to return,
climb back through the window,
hide under covers,
seal the room,
the pull of tide,
of voices on the bay stronger.
I plumb the bottom with flounder.
I am developing gills.
What will they say when they take down
the covers to bathe me?
They will know I have been
in this closed off room by the sea
too long.

“My Room of Aloneness and Quarantine” appeared in Poetry Motel and Wildwood.

Wildwood

I get on the El in North Philadelphia,
not far from Tulip Street
where Father died by
the posts of the ramps
to the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.
I sway with the clickety-clack of
the car pushing & pulling on the tracks
between closed windows
in the second story brick.

I want a woman with dark brown hair
to open one of those windows,
lean out with her breasts
brushing the fire escape,
and hand me a flower.
I want papaya & mango juice served
by the young man sitting next to me.
I want Miami in April,
and Wildwood in August.
I want Elvis on South Street,
and a big long car heading for New Orleans.
I want branches of magnolia
through an open window of
the St. Charles Street trolley,
cooked seafood in the hot wind,
and lips under the cream awning
of the Avenue Cafe.
I want to watch green grow under the door
of shotgun houses,
what pierces right through
and holds you there,
Jesse still in Tupelo.

I still want to be held in that way,
with mussels & oysters in the air,
to be wrapped in black shutters,
my hair flowing up a fire escape
to a Mansard roof,
a woman at the top of stairs
handing me a sweet southern rose.

I want tulips in North Philadelphia,
and the rhythm of the El
as it holds me between freeze-frames
of lovers in windows.
I want the reach of blue shell crabs
over the rim of a dented pot
as they are dropped into boiling water.
I want butter dripping down my chin
as I break open the shell.
I want Scott paper napkins
piled up beside my elbows on
a red checked tablecloth.
I want to ride in a convertible
down the curves of Fulling Mill Road.
I want the carousel and Ferris wheel,
the tunnel of love and roller coaster.
I want the Days of Wine and Roses
at the Strand Theatre,
The Platters and Chuck Berry.
I want clams on the half shell and
crab sandwiches at the Shamrock Bar.
I want Wildwood,
the sweet Wildwood of my youth.